Blair: the daily threat of terror

A sombre Tony Blair last night revealed that British intelligence is delivering fresh warnings every day of a terrorist attack, and predicted that the threat to Britain will only be repelled at a painful price.

In a grim speech to the Lord Mayor of London's banquet, he admitted the west was struggling to convince the Muslim world of its even handedness.

"We must accept that there is a significant part of the world that is at present deeply inimical to all we stand for," he said in his annual foreign policy address in the City.

The terrorists, he warned "are looking for ever more dramatic and devastating outrages to inflict upon the people they claim to be their enemy".

The sentiment was in stark contrast to the optimism of his party conference speech last year in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks when he insisted the west had to engage with developing nations to find a solution to the world's conflicts.

His spokesman insisted last night that the chilling message, and clearly heightened security in London, was not the product of a specific new intelligence warning.

However, with the war on Iraq growing ever more likely, security has been tightened at airports, and around the prime minister.

The prospect of a new kind of terror threat was underlined after it emerged that the food standards agency had written to all businesses reminding them of the need for their staff to "maintain a high level of vigilance against potential threats, whether physical, chemical or biological".

Mr Blair revealed that "extremism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states, was now preoccupying decision makers" in the same way that the battle between communism and liberal democracy dominated leaders during the cold war.

The new type of war, he said, "will not just test our ability to fight, but our character, our resilience, and our belief in our own way of life. It is a war I have total confidence we will win, but it will not be without pain or come without a price".

"The modern terrorist knows no bounds of geography, inhumanity or scale," he said. The public had to recognise that highly unstable states were only a step away from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Revealing the extent to which counter-terrorism is at the heart of Whitehall thinking, he said that barely a day goes by without some new piece of intelligence coming via the security services about a threat to UK interests.

"Some of it will be based on human sources in Britain and abroad. Some of it will be reliable; some of it may be misinformation being fed in to waste our time. Some of it will be gossip. Other material will be based on technical intelligence gathering.

"This kind of material is crossing the desks of the intelligence agencies, my desk, the home secretary's desk, all the time and other nations are in exactly the same situation."

Insisting that terrorism could not be defeated by security measures alone, he said the international community had to be united. But he admitted there was a danger of a polarised response with "Europe dividing off from the US, the Arab world versus the west, Muslim versus Christian".

In a clear message to the hawks in Washington, he said: "We need full US engagement and leadership on all the agenda.".

But he defended the US president, George Bush, saying he understood the need for this engagement, before adding: "The world needs to see that, for example, the famine in Ethiopia, the looming crisis in southern Africa can demand and receive our energy and attention too."

He again stressed the need for quick progress on a viable Palestinian state and Arab recognition of Israel. "Until this happens, this issue hangs like a dark shadow over the world, chilling our relations with each other, poisoning the understanding of our motives, providing the cover under which fanatics build strength."

He made no mention of his previous call for a Middle East peace conference by the end of the year. His officials denied any frustration with US support for Israel, but acknowledged his ambitious timetable had been rendered redundant by the Israeli elections.

In contrast to Mr Bush's axis of evil speech, Mr Blair said: "We need to reach out to the Arab and Muslim world. Where countries are undergoing a process of transition, we need to help."

The speech was intended to strike a balance between a call for public vigilance and the need to ensure daily life does not become paralysed by fear of a terrorist strike. Politicians, he admitted, faced a dilemma in not succumbing to the terrorist threat by over-reacting to every piece of intelligence.

Mr Blair confided that if he had acted on every piece of raw intelligence in the way that some had suggested after the Bali bombing, "we would have on many occasions shut down roads, railways, airports, stations, shopping centres, factories and military installations".

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